Echoing the sentiments of Brendan Schaub, Joe Rogan can’t understand why Sage Northcutt was booked to fight Cosmo Alexandre at ONE FC: Enter the Dragon.
At just 23-years-old, welterweight prospect Sage Northcutt has his whole future ahead of him to become a great fighter.
However, after suffering a brutal knockout loss to kickboxing veteran Cosmo Alexandre at ONE FC: Enter the Dragon, many analysts have been forced to reassess Northcutt’s future as a mixed martial artist.
Alexandre, who KO’d ‘Super’ Sage in just 29 seconds, fractured Northcutt’s face in eight different places and the former UFC fighter was forced to undergo an intensive nine-hour surgery to (literally) rearrange his face.
Former UFC heavyweight Brendan Schaub can’t understand why Northcutt was pitted against a world class kickboxer in his ONE Championship debut and, speaking on a recent episode of the JRE MMA Show, podcast host and veteran UFC commentator Joe Rogan echoed those sentiments and questioned Northcutt’s future in MMA.
“Cosmo Alexandre is a world class Muay Thai fighter,” Rogan said, per MMA Mania’s Dan Hiergesell. “He is world class as far as striking, it’s a completely different level, but I guess because it was an MMA fight he was willing to take it. They fought stand up and Sage took that karate stance and the dude circled off to his right and landed that f**king right hand.”
“It’s a terrible matchup, I don’t know why they agreed to let him fight that guy,” Rogan continued. “It’s just not smart…Sage is good, he’s very good, but these kinds of losses are terrible for his future because they are mismanagement losses in my opinion.”
It’s going to be difficult for Northcutt to rebound from such a devastating knockout loss, but it isn’t out of the realm of possibility. Michael Bisping, who found himself on the receiving end of Dan Henderson’s murderous right hand in one of the sport’s most iconic KO’s at UFC 100, came back to eventually win the middleweight title at UFC 199, finishing Luke Rockhold via first-round knockout.
As Bisping said prior to the fight, “If people can walk around – and I don’t mean this in a disrespectful way to religious people – and you believe the son of God came down to earth 2,000 years ago, and he killed himself for our sins, and he can walk on water, and there’s a God up there looking after ourselves, and if you get on your knees and pray to him that things will change, if you can believe that, then you can believe that I can knock the f–k out of Luke Rockhold two weeks from Saturday.”